At the beginning of last year's summer break, three members of the chapter came together and defined a summer project to improve their teamwork and software development skills and their knowledge about the field of computer vision by creating a free software alternative to the closed source augmented reality SDKs on mobile and adding another dimension to  the chapter’s quarterly magazine. In the first weeks they learned about OpenCV’s API and also found a head start library called ALVAR and implemented a marker based augmented reality software on PC and started porting it to android using android NDK during which they faced many difficulties and it took a month for them to have a working android application. Then they improved the software by using OpenGL for graphical layouts and optimized some parts of the code based on accurate profiling, this phase ended with the release of the freshmen’s special issue of the F1 magazine which contained a 3D model of the university shown on a page using this software. In the  final month they decided that the software should also support  marker-less detection and so  divided the work into 3 parts: First, they needed  better graphics which was achieved  using OpenGL-ES2. Second, they needed better performance on tracking the identified pictures, achieved by using motion flow and other computer vision algorithms and the third improvement was on picture identification-better known as feature extraction and matching. Because the software was limited to the computing resources of a mid-range smartphone they used a hybrid solution for feature extraction, which first used a visual dictionary to identify an image and then using BRISK features calculated the relative position of the camera to the image but these improvements weren’t ready in time and were not merged with the main code.

At the end of the summer a complete marker based AR solution and a partially working marker-less one was ready. And the chapter hopes to further continue the development of this open source software in the upcoming summer with a new team of developers, mentored by the previous ones.

Developers:
Ehsan Hajyasini  ehajyasini@acm.org
Sepehr Sameni  sepehr.sameni@acm.org
Hooman Shahrokhi  hooman.shaah@gmail.com
Supervisor:
    Navid Saleh  navid.saleh.n@gmail.com
Link:
    https://github.com/Separius/UT-ACM-F1-AR